La Voix Humaine – Sydney Festival

Overview

Sydney Festival is, above all, a means to get the most appealing, innovative and agenda-setting international performing arts works to visit our town. This year the showpiece of the program is 60-person 'underwater opera' spectacle Dido & Aeneas. But the one-woman La Voix Humaine ('The Human Voice') promises to floor with conversely little.

This Dutch production based on the monologue by famous poet and film director Jean Cocteau features actor Halina Reijn as a woman pleading with her lover down the phone line after a break-up. The actor has few props to call on, but in a device that's been used a few times in Sydney theatre, we watch the action unfold behind a glass wall. It's a chance to peer in to someone else's world, at perhaps its most tense moment.

Amsterdam's Toneelgroep are world renowned for their creative reworkings of classic texts, and La Voix Humaine is directed by the company's artistic director, Ivo van Hove. If you like it, you can see six hours more of their work at the Adelaide Festival.

La Voix Humaine is performed in Dutch with English surtitles. Image by Jan Versweyveld.